use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / hero

CRON · EXPIRES_AT · NOTIFICATIONS

An on-call escalation that ages out with your shift

Post a cron entry on Monday with expires_at set to Friday 09:00. The job pages your phone every 30 minutes for four days, then deletes itself the moment the shift ends. The next on-call posts theirs. No PagerDuty schedule, no shared scheduler config, no calendar reminder to disable it.

Read the cron docs

oncall.containers.hoody.com · this week

https://oncall.containers.hoody.com/rotation/this-weeklive

rotation · this week2026-05-04 → 2026-05-10

MON05-04p.aiyar
TUE05-05p.aiyar
WED05-06m.dossantostoday
THU05-07m.dossantos
FRI05-08j.okafor
SAT05-09j.okafor
SUN05-10l.haraldsen

active escalation entryACTIVE · expires in 4h 32m

ide7d3userm.dossantos

cron*/30 * * * *

cmd curl -fsS hoody-notifications/push/m.dossantos

expires_at2026-05-06T09:00:00Z

recent expired entrieshanded off

9e21p.aiyar05-06
c4b8l.haraldsen05-03
70dfj.okafor04-30
1a02m.dossantos04-27

deleted by expires_at — no janitor

the entry that pages m.dossantos exists only while m.dossantos is on call

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / handoff

How the shift hands off without a meeting

Three points in the week. The cron entry's existence tracks the shift exactly — no overlap, no gap, no leftover crontab line.

Monday 09:00 → Friday 09:01expires_at carries the shift

MONDAY 09:00

Post the entry

One curl with schedule */30, command pointed at hoody-notifications/push/me, and expires_at = Friday 09:00:00Z. Server returns id e7d3.

MON–FRI

Pings ride your phone

Every 30 minutes for four days the entry runs and pings hoody-notifications. Only your device. The team channel stays quiet.

FRIDAY 09:01

Entry removes itself

At 09:00:00Z the cron service deletes e7d3. The 09:30 tick has nothing to fire. The next on-call has already posted theirs.

Each on-call writes one POST when their shift starts. The expires_at field is the entire handoff protocol — the cron service does the cleanup, on the second.

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / mechanism

Two curls — one per shift

The whole rotation protocol is two HTTP calls per week. The on-call posts on Monday, lists on Friday, sees the entry is already gone. There is no shared schedule file to merge into.

monday.sh · m.dossantos

POST · entry

# monday 09:00 — i'm on call until friday 09:00
curl -X POST \
  https://oncall.containers.hoody.com/users/me/entries \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '["schedule":"*/30 * * * *","command":"curl -fsS hoody-notifications/push/m.dossantos","comment":"on-call wk19","expires_at":"2026-05-08T09:00:00Z"]'

# response
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
{ "id":"e7d3", "expires_at":"2026-05-08T09:00:00Z", "enabled":true }

friday.sh · m.dossantos

GET · audit

# friday 09:01 — the next on-call took over
curl GET https://oncall.containers.hoody.com/users/me/entries

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[
  // my entry e7d3 is gone — it expired
  // at 09:00 sharp. j.okafor's new
  // entry took over at 09:00:30.
]
# no slack thread, no calendar reminder

No shared scheduler service is involved. The cron entry is owned by the engineer; nothing about the next on-call's setup depends on the previous one cleaning up.

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / powers

Three things this shape removes from your week

An on-call entry that owns its own lifetime stops three classes of mistakes that PagerDuty configs and calendar reminders cannot.

ROUTING

Pings ride one device — yours

Because the entry's command points at your personal notify endpoint, escalations route to your phone for the duration of your shift, and only that. No accidental team-channel spam at 3am.

OWNERSHIP

No shared config to edit, no PR to merge

There is no escalation_policy.yaml that everyone touches. Each engineer owns their entry. Two on-calls in different time zones can't conflict by editing the same file.

CLEANUP

The handoff is in the data, not the chat

When Friday 09:00 rolls over you don't ask 'wait, am I still getting these?' The entry is already gone. Verifying the handoff is one GET that returns one fewer row.

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / capacity

What the cron service guarantees

Numbers come from the Hoody Cron API. Real limits, not invented ones.

EXPIRY PRECISION1 sec
Auto-expiration runs against the system clock. A 09:00:00Z expires_at deletes within the same minute the cron tick fires — no 5-minute janitor lag.
FIELDS PER SCHEDULE5
Standard 5-field cron expressions plus @hourly / @daily / @weekly macros. */30 * * * * is what fires every 30 minutes during your shift.
ISOLATION1 / user
Each system user has their own crontab. The next on-call's entry lives under their own /users/[name]/entries — never touching yours.

Limits per the Hoody Cron API: managed entries are JSON CRUD with UUIDs and expires_at; raw crontab access available per user; per-user crontab isolation is built in.

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / punchline

When the shift ends, so does the cron entry — automatically.

before · the rotation fileafter · two curls per week

WHAT THE OLD HANDOFF LOOKED LIKEedit oncall.yaml → PR → merge → page someone to disablefour humans · one shared file · still got pinged at 11am friday

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE NOWPOST /entries [ expires_at: '2026-05-08T09:00:00Z' ]one engineer · one curl · the cron service does the cleanup

Read the cron docs

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / replaces

What this replaces

The standard reach-for-it tools when you want on-call rotations. Each one charges you a service, a config repo, and a handoff ritual. A cron entry with expires_at charges you one POST.

PagerDuty escalation policiesPer-seat pricing for what is a curl into your phone
Opsgenie schedule rotationsA whole product to figure out who gets pinged this week
custom on-call config reposShared YAML that everyone PRs and nobody owns
remember to disable cron when handing offA calendar reminder that you set, ignore, and resent on Friday
manual escalation cleanupSlack thread at 11am Friday — "hey can someone unsubscribe me"
VictorOps rotationsAnother scheduler service for what one expires_at field does

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / cta

Stop disabling crontab lines on Friday morning. Set expires_at on Monday and forget it.

Read the cron docs

use-cases / on-call-shift-cron / related

Read the others

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Containers·Snapshots

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Exec·Agent·Code·Files

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Snapshots·Containers

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Display·Terminal·Files·Containers+1

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Containers·Snapshots·Exec·Files

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Agent·Snapshots·Containers·Browser+2

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Terminal·Snapshots·Network

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Pipe

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Pipe

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Pipe·Agent

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Pipe

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Pipe

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Pipe

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Pipe·Containers

Drag-drop uploads into your script

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Pipe·Exec

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

ffmpeg streams your screen to a pipe path with ?n=200. Each attendee curls the URL into a browser tab. No platform, no logins, no upload.

Pipe

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Container A writes to a pipe path. Container B reads from the same path. Backpressure is the connection. No Redis, no queue, no broker.

Pipe·Containers

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

The agent streams its trace to a pipe path you can curl from your phone. When it finishes, its last act hits hoody-notifications and your phone buzzes. Two URLs and a buzz — no SDK, no client app, no dashboard.

Pipe·Agent·Notifications

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

ffmpeg captures the mic, pipes to a URL. The other end curls and plays the audio. No Zoom, no SDK, no signaling server.

Pipe

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

A panel of five models reviews the same input. Each runs in its own container and streams its verdict to its own pipe path. A judge process curls all five in parallel and tallies the result.

Pipe·Agent·Containers

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

Snapshot the incident-time logs in hoody-files. Replay them through a Hoody Pipe URL with ?n=8. Eight engineers curl the same path and watch the cascade fire in lockstep — the post-mortem is a synchronized stream, not a Confluence doc.

Pipe·Files

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

A teammate pings for a 4 GB dump. Slack rejects it, Drive needs a share request. You type curl -T file …; they type curl … > file. The bytes move directly between disks — no upload bar, no link to share.

Pipe

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

One GPU runs llama.cpp. Its tokens stream into a pipe path with ?n=50. Fifty containers curl the same URL and split the stream.

Pipe·Daemon

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

Each container's monitoring loop curls a metric to a pipe URL. The dashboard curls the same URL with ?progress and renders the SSE stream.

Pipe

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

POST a managed cron entry with expires_at set 48 hours out. The job runs on schedule, then removes itself — no reminder, no cleanup PR, no stale entry.

Cron

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A hoody-cron entry that fires at 02:55 UTC, curls the snapshots URL, and names the artifact pre-migration-2026-05-04. Five minutes later the migration runs. If it succeeds, the snapshot sits idle and costs nothing. If it fails, you restore in 30 seconds with a single PATCH.

Cron·Snapshots

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Each tenant gets their own container and their own hoody-cron service. Customer A's 9am digest fires on time even when customer B's job hangs for 40 minutes, because they aren't on the same crontab.

Cron·Containers

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

A nightly cron POSTs a spawn request, the agent does its hour of work, then a second cron tears the container down. The agent exists only when there is work for it to do.

Cron·Agent·Containers

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

Raw events pile up in a sqlite URL. Every night a cron entry curls an exec endpoint, the script runs the rollup SQL, writes the daily table back. No DAG, no Airflow Postgres, no scheduler dashboard.

Cron·SQLite·Exec

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

Your repo checks in `.hoody/crontab`. The deploy script PUTs that file to the new container's Cron API. Each branch gets its container, its filesystem, its schedule.

Cron·Containers

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Three lines in one crontab: hourly browser scrape into SQLite, daily exec digest, weekly archive to files. Flat-rate server, three rhythms, no scheduler service.

Cron·Browser·SQLite·Files

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Customers POST their own 5-field expressions; their crontab lives in their container, isolated. You don't validate against a global queue.

Cron·Containers

Schedule the agent, not the script

A 5-field cron entry curls hoody-agent with a prompt instead of running a fixed script. Today is the last day of the month — the agent figures it out. The data shape changed — the agent figures it out.

Cron·Agent

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Each cron run POSTs a heartbeat to a notifications endpoint. A second cron checks last-heartbeat and pages on silence. Silence is the alert.

Cron·Notifications

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

An hourly cron POSTs a snapshot named with the hour. After 24 hours each new snapshot overwrites yesterday's at the same hour. The 24-floor time machine.

Cron·Snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

You captured 30 minutes of real Stripe traffic into a hoody-files folder. One cron entry replays it against staging at 9am every weekday — same volume, same payloads, same time-of-day pressure.

Cron·Files·Exec

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

Open the cron URL on your phone in the gate area. Tap a row, change a single field of the cron expression, hit Save. PATCH lands. The job fires tonight on the new schedule. No SSH session, no jump box, no laptop.

Cron·Terminal

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Cron at 9am POSTs to an exec script that builds the digest and curls a pipe URL with ?n=200. Two hundred recipients hit the same URL once.

Cron·Exec·Pipe

Mute the flaky job without losing it

PATCH /entries/[id] [ enabled: false ]. The job stays in your crontab waiting to be fixed. No deletion, no rewrite, no lost context.

Cron

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

A nightly cron POSTs to the supervisor agent with yesterday's agent traces from SQLite. The supervisor scores each one. Cron is the supervisor.

Cron·Agent·SQLite

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

The cleanup script checks if there's anything left to clean. When the directory is empty, it DELETEs its own cron entry. Job's done, job's gone.

Cron·Files

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

Cron weekly: POST to an exec script that runs certbot, posts the new cert to the proxy via PATCH. No shell session, no key, no jump host.

Cron·Exec

A weekly canary that tries to break production

Sunday 7am cron wakes a Hoody Agent in a fresh container against a snapshot of prod. It runs the OWASP top twenty, fuzzes the API, and writes a findings report to a URL by 9am. Container retires.

Cron·Agent·Browser·Snapshots

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

Eleven half-finished side projects on Heroku is eleven dynos at $5–7 each. On Hoody it's eleven containers on one $29 bare-metal box. Idle costs zero, the URL wakes the container in milliseconds, and the chess engine nobody uses still runs.

Containers

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Each open PR gets its own clone of a snapshot. The container wakes when reviewers click the link; idle PRs cost nothing.

Containers·Snapshots

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Twelve isolated containers, each its own SaaS, share one $49 bare-metal server — a step above the $29 entry tier, chosen here for the RAM headroom fifty containers want. Per-product margins go from negative to nice.

Containers

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Containers·Snapshots

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

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Containers·Workspaces

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

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Containers·Agent·Exec

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Staging used to die because it was expensive to keep around. When idle is free, staging gets to live — even the one a teammate touched 90 days ago.

Containers·Snapshots

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

Eight hundred isolated customers on three bare-metal servers — one flat-rate monthly bill, no per-tenant meter. Each tenant gets a real container with its own kernel namespace, filesystem, and URL. Idle containers cost nothing on top of the server you already pay for.

Containers·Snapshots·Exec

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Cache files live in /files on the box you already rent. Workers PUT and GET tarballs over HTTP. No S3 bucket, no egress, no third vendor — the bytes never leave the box.

Files·Containers

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls

Each prospect gets a real, isolated copy of your product seeded with their data. Cloned from a snapshot. Theirs to keep for a week.

Containers·Snapshots

An on-call escalation that ages out with your shift

How the shift hands off without a meeting

Post the entry

Pings ride your phone

Entry removes itself

Two curls — one per shift

Three things this shape removes from your week

Pings ride one device — yours

No shared config to edit, no PR to merge

The handoff is in the data, not the chat

What the cron service guarantees

What this replaces

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

Onboard a developer with one link

API endpoints that materialize on demand

Branch computers like Git

Real VS Code on your phone

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

One sandbox per customer, automatically

Wake up to a finished prototype

Emergency production fix from your phone

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Share your screen with a URL, not a meeting invite

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

Send a teammate a database state in one line

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

Drag-drop uploads into your script

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Schedule the agent, not the script

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Mute the flaky job without losing it

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

A weekly canary that tries to break production

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Kill the staging-server tax

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls